At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi's an­nounce­ment a few days ago that laws are fi­nal­ly in place for a Sex Of­fend­ers Reg­istry rep­re­sents on­ly a first step—in all like­li­hood just a ba­by step for­ward—in ful­ly es­tab­lish­ing a sys­tem to name and shame sex­u­al preda­tors.

As of now, it is not pos­si­ble for cit­i­zens to ac­cess the reg­istry sim­ply be­cause it is still be­ing de­vel­oped and pop­u­lat­ing it with the nec­es­sary in­for­ma­tion on in­di­vid­u­als con­vict­ed of sex crime re­quires a painstak­ing, pos­si­bly time con­sum­ing, process.

How­ev­er, with the Sex­u­al Of­fences (Amend­ment) Act 2019 in force as of Jan­u­ary 31, T&T now has a le­gal frame­work to prop­er­ly de­vel­op and con­sis­tent­ly en­force a sys­tem that will make it much more dif­fi­cult for sex­u­al preda­tors to hide in plain sight as they have been able for far too long.

This is a na­tion, sad­ly, where sex­u­al vi­o­lence and sex­u­al ex­ploita­tion are ma­jor prob­lems. While of­ten eclipsed by the out-of-con­trol mur­der count, sex crimes, par­tic­u­lar­ly against chil­dren, are at wor­ry­ing lev­els and the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) re­cent­ly con­firmed that there has been a marked in­crease in such of­fences.

In fact, at the week­ly TTPS news brief­ing last Wednes­day, it was re­vealed that for the month of Jan­u­ary 29 peo­ple were ar­rest­ed for a to­tal of 44 crimes, main­ly against chil­dren.

In oth­er parts of the world where Sex Of­fend­er Reg­istries have been ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed, they have proven to be ef­fec­tive tools in re­duc­ing the rate of sex crimes. They have been par­tic­u­lar­ly ef­fec­tive for track­ing the where­abouts of preda­tors who can­not so eas­i­ly blend in­to com­mu­ni­ties where un­der the cov­er of anonymi­ty or alias­es they can seek out new vic­tims. With the ex­is­tence of a reg­istry, their names, ad­dress­es, pho­tographs and de­tails of the of­fences they have com­mit­ted are avail­able.

This will be a valu­able ad­di­tion­al re­source, par­tic­u­lar­ly for mak­ing back­ground checks on in­di­vid­u­als seek­ing hous­ing or em­ploy­ment in ar­eas where sex of­fend­ers should not be giv­en ac­cess.

But this reg­istry needs to be full op­er­a­tionalised soon­er rather than lat­er. Any de­lays in im­ple­men­ta­tion on­ly leave loop­holes for the sex­u­al preda­tors among us who have been tar­get­ing chil­dren, women and the el­der­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to da­ta from the Min­istry of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, be­tween 2000 and 2019, a to­tal of 1,693 peo­ple were con­vict­ed of sex­u­al of­fences in T&T. All of their in­for­ma­tion now needs to be col­lect­ed, ver­i­fied and list­ed in the reg­istry, along with in­for­ma­tion on T&T na­tion­als con­vict­ed of sex crimes abroad who should not be al­lowed to slip back in­to the coun­try un­de­tect­ed.

This mon­u­men­tal but es­sen­tial task, along with full en­force­ment of oth­er claus­es in the amend­ed leg­is­la­tion, will make this coun­try much safer for its most vul­ner­a­ble cit­i­zens.